The themes in the Malouf corpus of freedom, responsibility, finitude, guilt,
alienation, despair, death and of the individual’s quest for authentic personal being
also give Malouf’s work a distinct existentialist tone, one which perhaps reflects the
dilemma of twentieth century humankind, epitomized in Malouf haunting question:
What else should our lives be then, but a continuous series of
beginnings, of painful steppings out, pushing off from the edges of
consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become?
(Malouf, 1978:135).
(a) The Role of Place.
When David Malouf said that he has puzzled over “ ... the way in which the
body, that small hot engine of all those records and recollections inhabits place and
the way the spirit inhabits the body (Kiernan, 1986:28), he seems to be alluding not
only to D.H. Lawrence’s ‘blood knowledge’, which is discussed later in this chapter,
but also to the existential question of where one’s essence is located, ultimately, the
concept of place. Places, in the Malouf corpus, that may exist and yet, may not.
Places that are sometimes constituted by a higher order of consciousness
superimposing itself over another, sometimes ordinary level of awareness. I n a
lecture given on his fiction and poetry Malouf said that his literature deals with
... a whole set of oppositions that is right at the centre of almost
everything that I do ... opposition between suburbs and
wilderness; between the settled life and the nomadic life; between
a centre – a metropolitan centre and an edge; between places
made and places that are unmakeable or not yet made; between
the perceiver in that poem (The Year of the Foxes) and all sorts of
things which are other and that may be the animal world or simply
some other consciousness (Hergenham, 1984:328).
These oppositions may be much more profound and include the spiritual
opposed to the flesh; the verity of childhood memories remembered by the adult
against actuality, and the tension experienced between the exterior, mundane life
and the interior unfathomable one. We see these oppositions in the relationships of
the protagonists, for example, between Johnno and Dante, Ovid and the Child and
Digger and Vic. These oppositions generate a sense of incompleteness and compel
the characters to question the meaning and purpose of their lives or to act in such a
way as to force the other to do so and to a sense of expectation of an elsewhere
place.